Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
King Industries' Tom Blaine presented Tuesday on the contamination plume to a full audience at the Clovis-Carver Public Library's Ingram Room.
CLOVIS — State and local representatives, area farmers and other stakeholders in the Clovis groundwater contamination stemming from Cannon Air Force Base met Tuesday to hear ideas for addressing the issue. The next step is to bring those ideas to the United States Air Force.
The center of Tuesday’s meeting, held at the Ingram Room of the Clovis-Carver Public Library, was a presentation by Tom Blaine of King Industries, who was retained for $15,000 to represent Curry County and Clovis in coordinating a plan “to protect the limited groundwater resources in the vicinity of CAFB.”
City officials have maintained that municipal water supplies are presently unaffected, but Blaine said the plume would only continue to spread without being addressed. His proposals include placing filters on all the impacted wells — an area of about four miles southwest of the base — isolating the plume with a moratorium on well drilling in select locations, and reducing the plume by injecting high-contamination areas with treated water. That “pump and treat” scenario still needs to be modeled and developed, he added.
Blaine’s presentation elaborated on many points he had addressed in June with the board of the Eastern New Mexico Water Utility Authority: describing the known extent of the fluorinated chemical contamination and outlining short-, intermediate- and long-term approaches to resolving it.
Blaine did not belabor the points known well by now to stakeholders: the announcement last year that chemicals linked to a firefighting foam used at the base (one among hundreds of Department of Defense locations impacted) had become manifest in private Clovis wells at levels exceeding federal health advisories.
Clovis Mayor David Lansford maintained that the U.S. Air Force needed the ultimate financial responsibility in remedying the situation. He also said he hoped the community could come together in “making the plea that we want to be the first on the list of remediation.”
The meeting concluded with Lansford pledging to hand-deliver Blaine’s presentation and recommendations to Air Force officials at the next opportunity — not as the mayor, nor as the ENMWUA chair, but as a representative of the community and its affected stakeholders he said.
